1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to ion implantation, and more particularly, to a system, method and program product for determining parallelism of an ion beam using a refraction method.
2. Related Art
Controlling the angle or parallelism of an ion beam is important for the proper operation of various different types of devices and processes. Ion implantation is a standard technique for introducing conductivity-altering impurities into, or doping, semiconductor wafers. A typical ion implantation process uses an energetic ion beam to introduce impurities into work pieces, i.e., semiconductor wafers. As is well known, introducing the impurities at a uniform depth and dose into the work pieces is important to ensure that semiconductor devices being formed to operate properly.
FIG. 1 shows schematically, in three dimensions, a conventional implantation of an ion beam into a wafer. Z-Axis and X-Axis constitute a horizontal ion beam scan plane. An ion beam is delivered (desirably) parallel to the Z-Axis and strikes the planar surface of the wafer. The X-Axis is horizontally perpendicular to the Z-Axis. The ion beam is scanned back and forth along a scan path parallel to the X-Axis. The Y-Axis is vertically perpendicular to the ion beam scan plane (i.e., the XZ-coordinate plane). The wafer is scanned up and down along another scan path parallel to the Y-Axis by moving the wafer up and down.
The depth at which impurities are implanted depends in part upon the angle of incidence of the ion beam along a desired direction, typically perpendicular, to the crystal structure of the semiconductor. Therefore, it is important to control the angle of the ion beam during implantation to maintain a desired direction of the ion trajectories relative to a wafer's crystal structure, particularly when scanning the ion beam across a wafer surface. In particular, in order to achieve repeatable implant results, the angle of the ion beam should be known and controlled to a range of error of less than 1° from parallel to the desired direction, especially for high energy implants and channeled implants. Conventional methods of determining ion beam parallelism are very complex and do not achieve the accuracy of angle determination described above. In addition, conventional methods of correcting ion beam parallelism are incapable of achieving the above-described range of error.
There is a need for an improved method of determining parallelism of an ion beam and/or adjusting the ion implanter system based on the parallelism determination.